When the Mental Health System Fails: A Case of a Mother who Suffered from Acute Psychotic Relapse

When people hear the word healthy, they instantly focus on physical connotations, like having low cholesterol levels, good cardiovascular strength, and has no disease. However, many people suffer from disorders that are not physical - something that are just as debilitating as some of the worst physical illnesses there is.

People with mental health disorders need professional help from mental health services to enjoy an improved quality of life. However, many people fail to seek appropriate care, or for some, they are ignored.

Such as this mother from Sydney who drowned her two-year-old in a bath which was let down by the mental health system, according to an NSW coroner.

Not Guilty of Murder

In September 2016, Deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame found the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, slipped through the cracks in the days before killing her daughter at the Miller home, reports 7news - an Australian news outlet.

In the same year, she was found not guilty of murder by way of mental illness during a judge-alone trial in the NSW Supreme Court. She told the police that she had drowned her daughter "to get rid of the evil in her," leading the court to believe that she is indeed suffering from mental illness.

Grahame said that the mother had recently relapsed into an acutely psychotic mental state and was deemed not responsible at law for her actions.

Moreover, Grahame said that both South Western Sydney Local Health District and the Department of Justice and Communities failed to provide significant care to the daughter and her mother.

Tragically Lacking Communication Between Health Care Providers

The toddler was only discovered by a friend of the mother, two or three days after she died. She was wrapped in a towel in the bath.

During that time, the mother had been admitted to Blue Mountains hospital's mental health unit after a traumatic event of a car crash in Leura. But the mother denied that it was her baby, "that wasn't my child. That was something evil in her."

Grahame believed that the daughter's death would have been prevented, noting that the general practitioner doing her check-up on September 9 noted a deterioration in the mother's condition. The doctor immediately informed the South Western Sydney Local Health District mental health service.

But the police could not find any proof of the correspondence, which Grahame described as a "disturbing and unexplained feature of the investigation."

She made a lot of suggestions and recommendations to the health and justice department of the state regarding the need for improved training and communication so as to avoid the same scenario from happening again.

The coroner also thanked the mother for taking part in the process by watching the inquest proceedings being handed down via video link, to help patients or parents who find themselves in a similar position.